RICHARD HART ALWAYS has
the right comeback, even when a murder has just been committed. He calls
his two-word retorts "nonescalating verbal self-defense."

Once a gunman and his accomplice
took taxi no. 1010, the San Francisco Yellow Cab that Hart drives, to
commit a murder. When the killer got out of the taxi and fired his gun,
the sidekick – still back in the cab – asked Hart, "Did you hear
that?"

Hart's response: "The
backfire?"

After the gunman jumped back in
the cab, the cool-headed taxi driver drove to the crowded intersection of
California and Leavenworth and abandoned the vehicle in the middle of
traffic: "I got out of the cab and took a walk," he explains. By the time
he got back to the stalled vehicle, one criminal had fled on foot, and a
crowd of potential witnesses – honking drivers and annoyed cable-car
riders – had gathered, preventing the remaining felon from attacking
Hart.

But the 54-year-old taxi driver
with watery blue eyes and a Mickey Mouse watch didn't always have such
verbal dexterity and street smarts. When he first started driving in San
Francisco some 15 years ago, he was constantly bruised by the daily verbal
assaults of rude passengers.

A typical brusque cab rider would
demand, "Take me to the Fairmont! Do you know where that is?" Hart says.
"And I would go speechless, because they would hurt my
feelings."

A graduate of Dartmouth College,
Hart was a systems programmer in the '60s: "We weren't just coders," he
muses. "We invented things." He worked at places like IBM and Atari before
layoffs and corporate malaise drove him to a new day job behind the
wheel.

In his cab he evolved from
browbeaten nerd to a silver-tongued field researcher in sociolinguistics.
"I realized after a while that no matter what they said, there was some
powerful way to alter the flow," he says.

Hart didn't just develop a
thicker skin. He created a verbal arsenal of retorts to diffuse tensions
both life threatening and trivial.

Hart fights back with one-liners.
Well, really two-worders: simple, sometimes goofy rejoinders like "That's
jolly" or "Too bad!" or "Where else?" that take the heat out of a conflict
or deflect an impolite question without offense.

The cab is his laboratory for
studying the spectrum of "things that can go wrong in conversation" – such
as loftiness, nagging, harassment, and intimidation – and testing his
responses: "They can't fire me because I'm a taxi driver," he says.
"That's why I can do this research."

By now, Hart attests, he's
invented and memorized a whimsical response to virtually every conceivable
rude, bullying, aggressive, or intrusive statement that another human
being can serve up, ranging from "Do you think I look fat?" to "I wasn't
talking to you!" to "Move the fucking car!"

Hart has divided his comebacks
into 88 categories depending on the offense. It's a brain-as-database
approach to thinking on your feet. His method: listen for keywords in
conversation so you'll always be able to have the perfect retort on the
tip of your tongue. "The main thing that a street-smart person does is
they don't daydream," he says. "They're putting their energy into
listening."

Sometimes his quirky ripostes are
momentarily confusing, but that's sort of the point. After all, it's hard
to respond to a comeback that you don't understand right away. For
example, when someone says, "Don't move or I'll cut your throat," Hart
recommends this response: "I'm easy!" followed by "Oh good, we'll see it
on the news." Don't sue me if this comeback results in
laceration.

Today, if you're lucky enough to
be a passenger in Hart's taxi, he'll offer you a business card with his
Web site's address: www.taxi1010.com. He used to sell his responses in
book form to his passengers for $22.50, and he sold 300 copies before
deciding that the Web was a better way to bring his retorts to the
world.

When I first got into Hart's cab,
I asked what I thought was an innocuous question: "How business?" His
response: "Who knows? What's your profession?" He later explained that
asking "How's business?" is intrusive because it implies a sense of
superiority. It's the kind of question that you'd ask someone in the
service industry but not the president of the United States or the queen
of England.

And it's such "posturing" that
Hart is out to quash with his pithy, "frequently poetic" stock responses.
He's out to deflate tough talkers and the self-important, as well as the
everyday clueless who are just falling back on tired truisms like "What do
you do?" Hart's little memorized scripts represent his idealized and
exalted view of what human communication should and can be.

Ultimately it's not the murderer
with the sawed-off shotgun who worries Hart. It's the everyday assassins
of daily conversation. "There's ancient magic in a person that can get
murdered by the mundane," he says. "The mundane is things like 'What did
you do this weekend?' As if there weren't infinite moments in the
weekend."